A bitter aftertaste

The scent of cardamom and freshly baked cinnamon buns hung heavy in the pre-dawn air, a fragrant promise of the day to come. Inside ‘Söta Bak’, the ovens glowed like a dragon’s heart. But Elsa, the elderly night baker, saw what she shouldn't. Not the rows of perfect kanelbullar, but a different kind of package, vacuum-sealed and tucked between the sacks of strong wheat flour. Her gnarled hand, which could shape dough with a sculptor’s precision, trembled as she reached for the internal phone. She never made the call. The rolling pin, still dusted with flour, was the last thing she ever felt. The killer wiped it clean, leaving Elsa slumped on the flour-dusted tiles, her final breath a ghost amidst the warm, sweet air.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The call came in as Inspector Mats Lundström was stirring his third coffee of the morning, a bitter brew as dark as his mood. September in Småland painted the forests in fiery hues, but his small Växjö apartment remained a study in grey. The divorce had been final for two years, but the silence still echoed. A photo of his son, Tobias, grinning in some Cambridge quad, was the only splash of colour.

“Lundström,” he grunted into the phone.

“It’s Elsa Johansson,” said the voice of his junior, Constable Petra Lindholm, young, sharp, and irritatingly energetic. “At Söta Bak. The baker. It looks… odd.”

“Odd how? Did someone burn the lussebullar?”

“She’s dead, Mats. And the scene… it’s too clean.”

Lundström sighed, the weight of a thousand such mornings settling on his broad shoulders. He pulled on a worn leather jacket, its scent a familiar mix of polish and regret, and headed out.

At Söta Bak, the dissonance was immediate. The shop front was a picture of rustic charm: gingham curtains, a chalkboard boasting the day’s specials, the intoxicating smell of yeast and sugar. The back room, however, was a morgue. Elsa lay peacefully, as if taking a nap, save for the awkward angle of her neck.

“No sign of a struggle,” Petra noted, her keen eyes scanning the spotless work surfaces. “But her shoes… scuffed. As if she was dragged slightly.”

Lundström grunted, his gaze sweeping the room. It was too tidy. A bakery was a place of controlled chaos; this was sterile. His eyes fell on a stack of flour sacks in the corner. One, slightly out of alignment, bore a faint, smudged mark, a partial print that didn’t match the floury texture.

“Who found her?”

“The owner, Björn Falk. He arrived to open up. He’s distraught.”

Björn Falk was a man whose physique suggested he sampled too much of his own merchandise, with a round, friendly face that currently was pale and tear-streaked. He sat in the small office, a hulking figure of grief.

“Elsa… she was like family,” Falk choked out, wringing a tea towel in his massive hands. “She’s been here for twenty years. Who would do this? We just bake bread.”

Lundström asked the routine questions, his mind elsewhere. He watched Falk’s eyes. They were red-rimmed and wet, but they darted, just for a fraction of a second, towards the large, industrial mixer in the corner.

Over the next few days, the case stalled. The coroner confirmed the cause: a sharp blow to the back of the neck, professional and efficient. The partial print led nowhere. Lundström found himself drawn back to the bakery, not as a detective, but as a customer. He sat in a corner, nursing a coffee and a surprisingly heavy almond pastry, observing.

He observed the stream of customers: elderly ladies, young mothers, and a different clientele—tough-looking men in expensive cars who would pop in for a single loaf of dark rye bread, always just after the afternoon bake.

“Strange,” Lundström mused to Petra over a pint that evening at a quiet pub. “The rågbröd. It always sells out by four. Who craves dark rye that specifically?”

“Maybe it’s very good rågbröd,” Petra offered.

“Or maybe it’s not just bread,” Lundström countered, his mind harking back to the meticulous Colin Dexter novels he favoured. Morse would have seen the pattern in the rhythm of the customers.

His break came from an unexpected source: Tobias, on their weekly video call.

“You look tired, Pappa,” his son said, his face pixelated on the screen.

“A difficult case. A baker was killed. It makes no sense.”

“Maybe she saw the dough rising,” Tobias joked. “You know, the other kind? A guy here at college, his cousin got caught. They were shipping stuff from Eastern Europe, hiding it in frozen food lorries.”

Lorries. Lundström’s mind snapped to the nightly deliveries at Söta Bak. The flour lorry from a Gothenburg wholesaler that always arrived late, its driver a sullen man who never made eye contact.

The next night, under the cover of a misty Småland darkness, Lundström and Petra watched from an unmarked van. The lorry arrived. Björn Falk, his friendly demeanour gone, directed the driver to the back. They didn’t unload sacks; they loaded them. Dozens of identical, heavy-looking sacks into a different, unmarked van.

“They’re not receiving,” Petra whispered, her breath fogging the window. “They’re distributing.”

Lundström’s blood ran cold. The bakery wasn’t the receiver; it was the hub. The perfect front. The daily foot traffic provided cover for the couriers, and the strong, distinct smells of the bakery masked any residual odour from the drugs.

He gave the signal. The silence erupted into controlled chaos. Blue lights strobed through the mist. Officers swarmed the yard.

Inside, the scene was even more revealing. Behind a false wall in the cold store, accessed by a mechanism hidden within the giant mixer’s control panel, was a packaging operation. Bricks of high-purity amphetamines, worth millions, sat wrapped and ready, alongside the vacuum-sealed packages Elsa must have seen.

Björn Falk was cornered, his friendly face now a mask of fury and fear. But he wasn’t looking at the police. He was glaring at the lorry driver, a gaunt man named Dragan.

“You fool! You left a mark on a sack! She saw it!”

Dragan said nothing, his hand edging towards a long, wicked-looking baking blade on the table.

“Don’t,” Lundström said, his voice calm but firm, his service pistol held steady. “The baking is over, Björn. It seems your recipes had a fatal flaw.”

The confession, when it came, was as bitter as Lundström’s coffee. Falk, drowning in gambling debts, had allowed his bakery to become the nerve centre for a Balkan cartel. Elsa, the loyal baker, had stumbled upon the truth.

“She was going to call the police,” Falk mumbled, head in his hands in the interrogation room. “I didn’t want to… Dragan, he… he said it had to look like an accident. But she fought back.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

A week later, the first autumn storm was lashing the streets of Växjö. Söta Bak was sealed, a black ribbon still tied to the door handle. The case was closed, the network dismantled, but the aftertaste was sour.

Lundström stood by his window, watching the rain. He had just spoken to Tobias, a conversation lighter than air compared to the weight of the last fortnight.

He picked up the photo of his son. The innocent smile seemed a world away from the greed and violence festering behind the façade of a small-town bakery. It was a reminder that the most poisonous things often came wrapped in the most pleasant of packages. With a sigh, he put the photo down, turned off the light, and sat in the comforting darkness, the ghost of cardamom and betrayal finally beginning to fade.

END